Love Letter from a Poet to the High Sierra by Eva Poole Gilson

FIRST, I came to house-sit. I had no idea what was in store for me. I was an innocent: a lonely writer who’d been living in San Francisco for five years, a city dweller who’d been so dulled by cement and buses and noises that she’d misplaced the belief in breathtaking, natural beauty.

I gingerly meandered down Yosemite’s Tioga Pass in a sun-roofed ’63 VW bug. It was the first of June 1975; it was one long dramatic gulp. Ice and snow were melting into slender, bending mirrors. Everything was silver and white and sky-blue and high and deep. I edged along in second gear, but my heart was in fourth. I felt like a golden eagle who’d suddenly burst the door of a metropolitan cage and rocketed to 15,000 feet. Space welcomed my wings.

Water lapped high in Mono Lake that year and reflected the dome of the world. Surely, I thought, there is no more exquisite place on earth.

But when I turned south onto Highway 395, the sun began to set. The expanses of land rolled away from me in my little car; they stretched and then curled up into great peaks on both sides. The Sierra stood gold and shiny copper to the west; in the east the Whites held their shoulders straight under the thick, drowning mauve of an early summer dusk. Every mile dropped me deeper and deeper into color and desert warmth and ever-increasing beauty.

Thank you note to San Francisco,

written on bended knee in the desert

Perhaps it is cowardly being here

Perhaps I should have stayed on the subway

or the buses of wear and tear and fear

I could still be lunching off plastic tray

at Fireman’s Fund — in temporary days

of insured claims, filed and lost, filed and lost

I could have learned to be desk-ridden, mossed

in the brain and heart, moldy in the mind —

metropolitan! But I chose instead

to run where the rapeless mountains stand lined

like massive love prayers waiting to be said

By my cowardice and will I’ve been led

to a land of columbine and aspen

to a dream where God will be and has been

During those first passionate weeks I only began to recognize the wiles of the object of my affection. I learned that it’s wisest to accept the hottest hours of each desert summer day with languid smile, not trying to force them into activity. From two until four each afternoon, I would lie dazed under the shade trees in front of the beautiful building which houses the Mt. Whitney Fish Hatchery outside the tiny town of Independence where I was staying. I would open one eye occasionally and glimpse the ducks floating cool on the pond. Or — if feeling a surge of energy despite the heat — I’d open both eyes. I’d watch the tall fringes of pampas grass and tule, green as young wheat. They leaned with their own weight, their heads glimpsing their own eyes in the green water where they stood.

That special, beginning summer I discovered parts of Inyo which were hidden to strangers, acquaintances, tourists. A place, like a person, only reveals itself to someone who takes time to love it. The reservoir of an abandoned desert town happened to be flooded with cool, mountain water. When I swam in that rectangular, isolated, private pool, I would lie on my back and feel exactly like a cut rose which someone had rescued from wilting — just in time. I would lie on my back and feel more crisply, beautifully alive than I ever had before in my life.

Then, letting my feet sink down, treading, mesmerized, I would watch water stream in one corner of the reservoir and out the other side. To rest, I would pull myself up onto the stone platform over which the water gushed on its way out. There, feeling fresh and vital and happily alone with the landscape I adored, I would think of SalvadoreDali — how he would have loved to paint the place, its geometrical, stone angles sharp against acres and acres of curving sand and sage. The whole Valley spread so fantastic in dimension that he wouldn’t have had to make it surreal — it was surreal.

Whitney, the highest mountain in the continental states, arched over me as I flutter-kicked on my back in that lapping, lulling reservoir. I began to want to explore more and more of the vastness which is the Owens Valley, Inyo County. I wanted to climb and hike and camp. But more than that — I wanted to stabilize the love relationship: I wanted to move from City to Beauty.

It would take me a full year to maneuver the change of home, but this kid originally from the flat Midwest was once and for all dazzled by those natural skyscrapers.